Great Short Poems

This outstanding anthology of short verse offers poetry lovers an impressive sampling of more than 150 masterpieces spanning over 400 years of English and American literary history. Although short in length (the longest are 24 lines, most 16 lines or less), these poems are long on beauty, power, imagination, and originality.

Included are such memorable compositions as John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," Shakespeare's "When, in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes," "On His Blindness" by John Milton, William Blake's "The Tyger," Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," Shelley's "Ozymandias," as well as works by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Amy Lowell, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and many others.

Read more

Attractive and inexpensive, this compilation of carefully chosen verse contains many of the most loved, most anthologized poems in the English language. Students, teachers, and any lover of great poetry will treasure this splendid collection.

Includes three selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The Road Not Taken," "Loveliest of Trees," and "Ozymandias."

Audience
adult
Length
short · 64 pages
Form
poetry

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Great Short Poems? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Great Short Poems. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. 101 Great American Poems Shares poetry, classics, poems
  2. Eliot: Poems Shares poetry, poems, classics
  3. The World's Greatest Short Stories Shares classics
  4. AnOther E.E. Cummings Shares poetry, poems, classics

“People who read Great Short Poems tend to reach for these next.”

  1. 100 Best-Loved Poems
  2. The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology
  3. The Philip K. Dick Collection
  4. Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom

“If you want more of the same, start with these.”

  1. With Deer
  2. Idiot Verse
  3. Ghost Machine
  4. One Fierce Hour

“If it was the poetry that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Begin Again: Collected Poems
  2. Stardust and Sheets
  3. Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poems
  4. Collected Poems

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Great Poems by American Women: An Anthology
  2. African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927
  3. How to Eat a Poem: A Smorgasbord of Tasty and Delicious Poems for Young Readers
  4. World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others